Sundance

I recently decided to explore alternative to Google Adsense. The Google Adsense programme has served me well over the past few years, but progress seems slow and Google is not my favourite corporate master. Everything Google does seems over complicated, the terms and conditions annoy me, and there referral system seems designed to not have to pay out very much at all! On top of all that the referral system seems to treat new referrers with a degree of suspicion, not paying out at the full rate until a probationary period is over.

All credit to Google for achieving what they have done from humble beginnings, and blazing the trail. Without them I would be poorer. But I must now investigate some of the opposition.

Oh, let me just add one more reason for checking out alternatives to adsense. Adsense only pays out in dollars, which are then converted to local currency on payout day. Those of you who are in the United States may not have noticed, but the dollar isn't worth anything now. I am UK based, and each Dollar I earn on Adsense gets me a meager £0.48. You can't buy anything with that in the UK.

So, enter Oxado. My primary reason for choosing Oxado was that they pay in Euros. Each Euro I earn on Oxado will be forth in the region of £0.71. That's a big difference, somewhere in the region of 40%!

There are other Pay Per Click advertisers that don't pay dollars, but the sites I run (not this one!) follow reasonably small niches, and I wanted to make sure there were enough ads being served which were on topic. Oxado seems to gather its ads from far and wide, and allows you to search by keyword and see what ads might be shown, and how many advertisers they have available wanting to show ads in that field. (Google does offer something similar, but correct me If I am wrong with Google you can't see that they have say 50 advertisers bidding for the keyword widgets).

So, plenty of ads and a Euro payout won me over. Also I had heard tell that Oxado pay a massive one Euro a click!!! (Not true, as you will see later).

So, I devised a little experiment. Google won't let you serve ads from another contextual ad provider on the same page as their ads, and I didn't want to change my entire site to Oxado ads without a trial run, as my sites are generally HTML and to change the ads on each page is fairly labour intensive. I wanted to be sure!

What I did: I identified my highest earning page using adsense (which was also the one with the most clicks, but it doesn't have to be this way). I then switched all the ads on that one page. It is a high traffic page, by my standards at least, and I have enjoyed a good click through rate (CTR).

I felt a bit guilty removing the adsense ads that have earnt me so much, but they had to go!

I waited 24 hours and then checked the results.

Shock: When I crunched the numbers and converted the revenues into pounds using XE, my revenue had dropped 50!!!

Why did this happen? Well...as I understand it, and this is my impression not necessarily fact, Google reads the text on the page and targets ads accordingly. Oxado does this but also puts weight into the value of meta keyword and description tags. I am guessing that they use this information more than google, or maybe google doesn't use it at all. Anyway, when I examined my meta tags I found a lot of rubbish there, left over from the early days when stuffing all related keywords into the meta tags seemed like a really good idea. I cleaned them up and made them relevant to the kind of ads I want shown (obviously this is the same as them being relevant to the page content! Duh!)

So...the next twenty-four hours as they say are critical! So watch this space, as I will post back tomorrow with an update!

Webmasters, make money displaying Oxado contextual ads!

Update! For part II click here.